Valentine Week: Windchime by Tony Hoagland

Happy Valentine's Day! Let me just start by saying publicly to Tom: You're the One. You're still the one. (This is the 38th Valentine's Day we have celebrated together. How ONEderful is that?)

The secret to a long marriage? Laughter. 

Today's poem may surprise you -- I was looking for different poems, something you might not have read and something that captured married love. And I found this beauty. It's written by a husband for a wife, so a bit backwards for me to share it. But ... the feeling is universal:

Windchime
by Tony Hoagland

She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It's six-thirty in the morning
and she's standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand, 
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she's trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it -- the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn't making
because it wasn't there. 

No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving -- 
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it. 

P.S. Some of us do still have faith in the whole "till death do us part" part ... Happy Valentine's Day!